Richland High School Insignia
An Opinion Piece in the New York Times Sunday April 7th, 2019,(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/opinion/sunday/climate-change-nuclear-power.html), would lead us to believe that nuclear power plants can save us from the difficult problem of transforming out power supply for carbon neutrality. The authors suggest that we can mass produce nuclear power plants cheaply and make them save enough that we can live next to them without problems. I'm sure that's possible, but (and there's always a but), If we can why haven't we?
My theory about that is that the authors didn't take Capitalism's insatiable quest for increased profits. If they build multiple plants, all alike, the buyers will expect that by plant number three or four there should some discounting of the price? That's why each plant is a new untried and more expensive plant than the last. The authors point to France and Sweden, both democratic socialist countries, as examples. Governments in those countries don't think that putting their electrical grid in the hands of Capitalists is the cheap way to go. Let's not believe that the forces of capitalist America will save us from the ravages of climate change unless we are willing to allow their profits to multiply at the same time.
That; however, isn't the most important oversight in this piece. The authors seem to think that radioactive waste, the byproduct of nuclear reactors, is a small and not very dangerous item. "Americas total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart - and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools". I would suggest they tell that to the folks at Hanford, Washington who have been trying to clean up the residue of seventy years of waste from only four reactors. Like others, the authors hope that future technological advance will keep us from being buried in our own radioactive effluvia.
